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Afrobeat’s King, Recrowned

The big-talking title character of “Fela!,” the pulse-racing new show about the Nigerian musician and activist Fela Anikulapo Kuti, is not someone you rely on for literal truth. For this self-defined “black president” of his own republic of rebellion, to speak is to magnify, to exaggerate, to mythologize.

But the grandiose claims that Fela, played with inexhaustible swagger by the remarkable Sahr Ngaujah, makes for his music wind up feeling dead accurate. In the percussion section in his band, he says early in the show, you feel “the pulse of the world, the impulse of life.” And darned if 10 minutes into this production, which opened Thursday night at 37 Arts, you don’t find yourself believing this as gospel truth.

As played by the Brooklyn band Antibalas, standing in for the army of musicians that accompanied Mr. Kuti on his world tours, this is music that gets into your bloodstream, setting off vibrations you’ll live with for days to come. And the choreographer and director Bill T. Jones has come up with startling visual equivalents for the primal and sophisticated fusion of cultural elements that is Afrobeat, the music of Fela.

That the beat goes on, insistently and persuasively, makes “Fela!” nigh impossible to resist. If you set aside your basic nervous and circulatory systems, though, you might observe that by the standards of the well-made musical, “Fela!” leaves a lot to be desired.

The structure of the book, written by Jim Lewis and Mr. Jones, feels slapdash to the point of confusion. For all the impudence and exuberance of the wall-to-wall music by Mr. Kuti that is used here, a pious haze of hagiography hangs over the show, creating the blinkered view of a great man martyred.

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Sahr Ngaujah performs the title role in the musical "Fela!," about Fela Anikulapo Kuti, which opened Thursday night at 37 Arts.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Yet the ascendancy of the music in “Fela!,” and the three-dimensional translation of it by Mr. Jones and his vibrant design team, makes such criticism irrelevant for as long as you’re in your seat (or out of it, since the audience is regularly encouraged to stand and undulate). What’s more, “Fela!” isn’t just one helluva party, though that it definitely is.

In giving physical life to Mr. Kuti’s songs of political rage, sorrow and satire, Mr. Jones and company offer exciting music and its social context in one breath. There are occasional filmed images of Nigerian crowds and narrative segments meant to orient us in history.

But it’s the performance of song and dance that allows Western audiences to grasp on a much deeper level the complex, culturally layered world that Mr. Kuti was responding to. I suppose “Fela!,” in shaping a show around one artist’s songbook, fits into the category of jukebox musical. But the word jukebox suggests containment, confinement. “Fela!” is a show that melts walls.

This is fitting, since Mr. Kuti himself resisted confinement throughout his life (1938-97), though he was regularly incarcerated as a political prisoner. The son of an Anglican minister and a social reformer who became Nigeria’s leading female activist, he grew up to create a sound that melded tribal Yoruba rhythms and incantations with ingredients from the jazz, pop and funk he heard while living in London and the United States.

The expansiveness of his music was reflected in his performances (he traveled with a full choir of singers as well as an orchestra-size band) and his personal life (he married 27 women in one ceremony). His songs spoke out against the corruption and tyranny of Nigeria’s military government, and he became Africa’s foremost pop star as folk hero. He did indeed run for Nigeria’s presidency (for his own Movement of the People party) and declared the compound where he lived its own republic.

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A scene from "Fela!"Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

That “Fela!” is able to suggest the scope of such a life in a cramped Off-Broadway theater is no mean accomplishment. (Occasionally it does feel overcrowded.) The show is set in the Shrine, Fela’s nightclub in Lagos (vividly recreated by Marina Draghici), on the night of what he says will be his last performance there.

The script squeezes in a lot of information, using patterning devices like Fela’s imagined movie about his life (to be called “Black President”) that are picked up and abandoned fitfully. The show’s arc, such as it is, traces Fela’s attempts to commune with the spirit of his heroic mother, Funmilayo (the heavenly voiced Abena Koomson), who died from injuries suffered when government troops raided his compound.

Our awareness of that arc comes and goes, like a watery rainbow. But I at least was never less than fully engaged. Mr. Ngaujah’s Fela is a compelling master of ceremonies in his Elvis-style jumpsuit, a musical theater multitasker who sets the pace for his band and plays saxophone as well as conducting a personal tour of his life with a cocksureness that goes beyond the meanness of arrogance. He gives the impression of leading with his hips and his head at the same time.

Early in the performance he breaks down his brand of music for the audience members, teaching them to tell time with their hips, a lesson that has the effect of tattooing the show’s propulsive rhythms onto them. He then lets each of the dancers strut their individual stuff in a show-stopper number called “Originality.”

This spirit of individualism has been central to Mr. Jones’s work as a choreographer during the past several decades, both for his own company and more recently for the Broadway production of “Spring Awakening,” for which he won a Tony. Here he plays off naturally assertive identities against the social regimentation and repression that Fela sings about, especially in the numbers “Shuffering and Shmiling,” which presents a haunted parade of stooped silhouettes, and “Zombie.”

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Sahr Ngaujah in "Fela!"Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Fela’s group marriage to his back-up girls makes saucy and elegant use of one of the show’s greatest assets: the deliciously self-possessed, vulpine women who play Fela’s adoring “queens,” who are always on hand to towel his brow and light his joints between numbers. (The smashing Sparlha Swa is featured as Fela’s great love, though her role in his life is never made clear.)

By the time Fela finally crosses into the afterlife to make contact with his dead mother, you may have forgotten such a journey was the point of this gathering. You are unlikely, though, to forget the otherworldly land that Mr. Jones conjures in a tribal ballet, artfully enhanced by Ms. Draghici’s costumes and Robert Wierzel’s lighting. It is truly heaven on earth. Or do I mean earth in heaven?

Fela was not, by most accounts, a great political mind. His blueprints for societal change never went far beyond the credo of power to the people. But like all great popular musicians he embodied a culture’s joy, pain and restlessness with an instinctual grasp that politicians can only wish for.

The sweet potency of the idealistic, energetic rebel is already being demonstrated this season in the Public Theater’s rousing revival of “Hair.” Mr. Jones and company have given us an African variation on the same theme that triumphantly stakes out its own pioneer territory in the expanding land of musicals.